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Redirects (301/302) versus errors (404)

I am not able to convincingly decide between using redirects versus using 404 errors. People are giving varied opinions. Here are my cases

1. Coding errors - we put out a bad link

a. Some people are saying redirect to home page; the user at least has something to do PLUS more importantly it does NOT hurt your SEO ranking.

b. Counter - the page ain't there. Return 404

2. Product removed - link1 to product 1 was out there. We removed product1; so link1 is also gone. It is either lying in people's bookmarks, OR because of coding errors we left it hanging out at some places on our site.

5 Responses

Google often tries to crawl pages that don't exist - simply to make sure they aren't missing anything on your site. When a page is clearly broken, you want to communicate this to Google by serving a 404 (but you can make it a friendly 404)

What about the funky URLs that are “clearly broken?” When our algorithms like your site, they may try to find more great content on it, for example by trying to discover new URLs in JavaScript. If we try those “URLs” and find a 404, that’s great and expected. We just don’t want to miss anything important (insert overly-attached Googlebot meme here)."

Google expects to find 404s on your site. When they don't find 404s for links that should be broken, this sends confusing signals and could cause crawl problems.

George AndrewsSoftware Developer, SEO, and Social Media Strategy at Capable Media, Intellisale

Jan 23, 2013

Richard and Moosa are right, use a friendly 404 page to help your users when they reach a page that can no longer be found. Simply redirecting them to the home page doesn't fix the issue of the missing page. Here's an old, but relevant, post on the subject: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/personalizing-your-404-error-pages.

For your second issue, if you've permanently moved to a new product page, you should certainly 301 redirect to not only pass on all the link juice from the old page, but also to provide the best user experience for your customers - they were looking for the product so give them the new improved page :).

404: This is the status code that browser give when the page on the website is not available.

302: This is the status code of the page if it is temporary redirected to some new page. This simply means that old page will not pass the link juice to the new page but when user reach to this URL will drive them to a new location.

301: This is the status code which does almost the same work as 302 but in that case old URL passes its link juice as well. This is commonly known as permanent redirection.

Websites usually should not use 404 as this disturbs the user experience of the page but upon requirement and keeping scenarios in mind use of 301 or 302 is always an intelligent approach.

Hi
For 1:
I would suggest a custom friendly 404 page. This means the user sees a page saying something like 'Sorry the product / page you were after no longer exists. Here are some useful options ( then list a handful of popular page links). You could even includes a site search or your tel number / email to contact.
This means the user knows what has hppened, had somewhere useful to go but it returns a 404.
For 2:
If the page is being moved - use a 301 redirect on the existing page.
If you are simply not selling that product anymore than do a 404 as above.
In both cases monitor your GA and GWT for 404s and fix where applicable.
All the best.
Richard

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